A virtual reality comes into existence when a group of people experience a simulation as if it were real.
Randy Walser (1991, p. 57)
One of the common themes of research into both sport and digital culture is the attention that has been given to their realness. It is often said that sports operate outside of the real world and that they are essentially non-serious, playful pursuits made possible by their gratuitous logic (Morgan 1994). This logic is constituted by a set of rules that condition a specific activity and distinguish it from others. In turn, these rules prescribe a set of sub-optimal efficiencies that bring into existence the peculiar practices of sports and the means by which goals may be pursued (Suits 1967). For example, baseball involves a batter swinging a uniquely sculptured object at a relatively small, hard ball that has been thrown at high speed from a distance of 60 feet and 6 inches. Hitting the ball would be much easier if either the ball or the bat were a little bigger, or perhaps made of different materials, or if the pitcher were to throw more gently. However, the optimal test of baseball players—it is thought—is achieved by the unique balance of these constitutive elements. There is nothing that dictates their precise relation to one another—the ball could be bigger or could be pitched more slowly, and the bat could be easier to wield. Yet the present-day physical limitations of players require that the sport’s equipment be created to these dimensions. That is not to say that they are fixed; rather, it is to say that the perception of what sports are testing and the manner in which those tests are carried out changes. And the components of baseball have indeed changed. For instance, the distance between pitcher and hitter has been changed over the years as pitchers have become more competent.
Thus, the object of the game of baseball is brought about by the reasonably precise configuration of the activity, which is carefully balanced to test specific kinds of human capabilities. While each individual component of this composition may be relatively arbitrary, their collective assembly coheres around a very specific set of abilities that players consider worthy of testing themselves against. For example, if the distance from the pitcher to the batter were much greater, pitchers would not be able to pitch as accurately. Alternatively, if that distance were too short, batters’ ability to react to pitches would be diminished. Baseball players accept these configured limitations in order to make possible the specific test within the game, and the game relies on their acceptance. The same is true of all sports: Players must accept the creation of imposed limitations to permit the enjoyment of certain kinds of tests of ability.
It may also be said that sports are unreal to the degree that they operate outside of society’s norms and structures. The abandonment of these norms creates circumstances in which athletes are allowed to commit acts of violence upon one another without fear of legal reprisal, as in the case of combat sports. These protected zones of social activity allow unusual forms of behavior to occur and to be celebrated by an otherwise law-abiding community.
These observations are not undermined by also recognizing that what takes place in sports has consequences in the real world. For instance, participation in sports is often a means toward greater socialization among individuals who otherwise would not have such opportunities. Furthermore, the history of sports is replete with examples in which the mere existence of sports has led to tangible social or political change or has enabled people to make symbolic gestures. For example, at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, athletes from North Korea and athletes from South Korea were able to compete under a common flag for the first time in history, despite remaining politically separate. Sometimes it is only in the simulated, symbolic world of the sports field that such gestures are possible.
Though one might presume that these two forms of unrealness are contradictory, they are, in fact, perfectly compatible. Sports are possible only because of the acceptance of their lusory (unreal) elements, and yet they remain highly consequential in the wider social and political sphere, affecting the lives of millions of people in profound ways. A similar thesis may be advanced in regard to digital worlds: Life within them may be described as unreal or as a form of virtual existence that occurs separate from our lives outside of such environments. Indeed, virtual reality is a foundational notion within these debates, and it deserves special consideration to allow closer analysis of how it is tied to my interpretation of sports practices.
In the 1980s, the virtual reality of cyberspace was described by William Gibson as a “consensual hallucination”—a world brought into being by “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data [l]ike city lights receding.” Today’s vision of virtual reality is somewhat less poetic, grounded in the lived experience of virtual worlds, but it remains intimately connected to the distinction between the words virtual and real. For many people today, life online is as familiar to their modes of communication and daily life as time spent in offline spaces. Indeed, our experiences of life in offline and online worlds often occur simultaneously. People move through virtual realities while walking through physical worlds, as when one is walking while texting, talking, or navigating the Internet. Indeed, increasingly digital games are designed to expolit this duality, utilizing augmented reality to make gaming more immersive, as for Pokémon Go. Consequently, the division between the virtual and the real requires greater scrutiny today, in order to come to terms with what is understood as unreal or real within digital spaces.
In the early 1990s, Howard Rheingold argued that the concept of virtual reality failed to adequately address the real-world consequences of spending time in cyberspace. What are we to make of these propositions when coming to terms with how digital technology operates today? Paul Virilio, Bruce Sterling, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, and even (to some extent) Jean Baudrillard balked at the idea of a virtual reality that could be discussed as oppositional to some other more tangible reality. Instead, they defended the realness of the virtual, Virilio treating it as a substitution and Baudrillard as a simulation. Despite their differences, both cases treat life in digital worlds as unequivocally meaningful and certainly consequential. So how should we regard the relationship between online and offline worlds if they are increasingly one and the same?
In this chapter, I utilize the word unreality to discuss the common ground between digital and sporting virtualities and to explore how they occupy distinct but similar spaces within society. Thus, I undertake the historical and philosophical work of making sense of these spheres of unreality, while appealing to the idea that their unreal status provides only a partial insight to their value. The main point is to investigate the connotations of unreality within a wider politics of the public sphere. In this context, unreality becomes an area of concern only when a prior sense of reality is threatened. Understood in this way, the relative realness of digital and sporting virtualities is irrelevant to the value we attribute to each of them, since it is principally their juxtaposition that creates the tension. In other words, when unreality threatens to become a dominant mode of existence (as may be said increasingly of life online), people become anxious about the erosion of life offline.
Such conditions generate a kind of “virtual anxiety” (Kember 1998) as demonstrated by the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, who often criticizes life online fearing its consequences. Greenfield’s underlying rhetoric is suspicious of life in virtual worlds, and she has dismissed Twitter and the wider reliance on computers as detrimental to a richer, more intelligent life that could be led by elevating experiences in offline worlds. Greenfield’s anxieties lead me to consider how the computer game—as a distinct cultural form—has been isolated as the locus of social concerns about computer culture and about a decline in physical, creative culture that allegedly follows from its growth. I have deep reservations about the legitimacy of that perspective. I am especially keen to draw on examples from exergaming, or serious gaming, as substantive challenges to this naive critique of gaming cultures.
Although subsequent chapters within the book will assess how computer games transform our expectations of digital culture and sports practices, this chapter emphasizes how they are converging practices with similar internal logics. This is a crucial position to accept in my broader thesis, as the critique of life online falls foul of the fact that life offline—the supposed standard to which virtual realities are judged—is rapidly becoming constituted by virtual systems. From our reliance on contactless payments—or even the Bitcoin1 economy—to the vast digital systems that underpin the transitioning of goods around the world, life offline is quickly becoming a historical concept as the principle of experiencing everything everywhere comes to define what can be expected from the next era of digital connectivity.
The unreality thesis of digital worlds underpins the additional claim that people would have more valuable, richer lives if only they were to spend less time within such environments. In the mid 1990s, Bruce Sterling wrote of such concerns as being fueled by an anxiety that life in virtual worlds would lead to neglect of life offline:
The good news is that I can chat with distant strangers. The bad news is that while I’m on the Internet, I’m not chatting to my next door neighbour. I’m not going to any neighbourhood rallies, I’m not throwing parties for local friends, I’m not babysitting other people’s kids. It may be that I’m not even talking to my own children, who are off in the living room being raised by Nintendo. (Sterling 1997, p. 29)
Indeed, there is a great deal of literature detailing the detrimental societal consequences of spending too much time online as a kind of addiction. Moreover, this “addiction” is often used to explain many of society’s ills (Funk 2001; Griffiths 2000). The same is also sometimes said about participation in sport, which for many committed enthusiasts may become all consuming, detracting from other forms of socializing and even leading to isolated modes of existence and unhealthy obsessions with physical training. Furthermore, schools’ reducing the amount of time allotted to physical education reinforces the idea that sport is less important than more serious activities, such as mathematics or science. At the professional level, the obsessive behavior associated with becoming competitive at an elite level may also lead to high-risk behaviors, such as experimenting with drugs to improve performance, or to corruption via fixing. In this sense, the virtual world and sports arenas are often treated pejoratively, as lesser worlds—not inspirational Second Lives, but second-class lives, opposed to primary, more important modes of existence, where a more wholesome form of social interaction takes place. At best, they are seen as recreative experiences that—to adopt the civilizing thesis of Elias and Dunning 1986, which claims that sport’s principle function is to operate in service of life outside of sport—support the working life.
How should one make sense of these pejorative and reductive presumptions about the unreal status of the digital and sports worlds? Now that many people spend more time communicating with others via technological devices than they spend communicating face to face, does it betray technological progress to berate these circumstances or resist them? After all, people quite comfortably inhabit both worlds without much difficulty most of the time. Users of cell phones can still value the moments of contact and immediate connectivity they provide while reviling behavior such as talking loudly on a train or using a phone on an airplane. Sadie Plant’s (2003) early work on mobile-phone culture attests to these contradictions. Her informants talk both of feeling that “there’s something missing” (p. 64) if they are without their mobile phones. Equally, it is apparent that the device can be “a source of tension, disagreement, and antipathy” (p. 33).
As the use of mobile devices continues to increase year by year, these contradictions are becoming ever more apparent, though cultures also adapt. For instance, for some time it might have been considered impolite for someone to let a cell phone ring during a meeting. Today, at many public meetings, attendees are no longer asked to switch off their mobile devices; indeed, at some meetings attendees are asked to keep them turned on so as to be able to share content using social media. This is not to profess that there is an absence of etiquette in mobile culture, or that all uses of devices in all settings are free from any expectations to disconnect. Rather, it is simply to highlight how conventions around technology change, and to point out that what is considered undesirable or even offensive may change after a period of mass adoption and adjustment.
The concepts of reality and unreality are useful devices for thinking about the relationship between digital culture and sports. Indeed, I am unwilling to relinquish the concept of unreality completely, despite acknowledging that the term raises questions about what takes place within alternative realities. We ought, I think, to pursue unrealities, as much as we pursue reality in our lives. Our absence from the conventions of real-world spaces is crucial to our imagination and our ability to cultivate new ideas. Yet there is also an ontological distinction between these forms of human existence, and the import of this claim becomes apparent when one considers examples of transgressive behaviors within unreal worlds. For example, if an athlete abuses an umpire, assaults a spectator, or commits some other kind of moral transgression of the norms of the practice, the unreality of the practice become a matter of interest to the outside world. Infamous examples of moments when the unreality of sport became a real matter of wider social concern include Eric Cantona’s flying assault on a Crystal Palace fan in 1995 and Mike Tyson’s biting the ear of Evander Holyfield in 1997. More recently, Oscar Pistorius’ complaints at the end of the 200-meter race in the 2012 London Paralympic Games reveal the expectations people have of athletes to maintain the suspension of their disbelief throughout their victories and their losses. Such transgressive acts—or even just our knowledge that such transgression is possible—gives sports their special social value and makes them an enduring and compelling form of spectacle.
Of course, the naive unreality interpretation of sports clashes with the reality of how it can affect the world in important and consequential ways. In simple economic terms, a nation may invest money in grassroots community sports or in its elite athletic population and, in so doing, may dramatically affect how sport is valued and experienced. Moreover, there are ways in which what happens in sport competitions bears on political relationships between nations. Indeed, sports policies and participation often bring about forms of social change—in South Africa, for example, rugby was utilized as a vehicle for unification. Sports can also provide moments of manifestation and activism that shed light on important political issues. This is further indication of how sports transcend the playing fields and occupy other realities. Moments of this transcendence from unreality to reality demonstrate how sport has become a very serious business indeed.
There are also many stories that explain how the experience of becoming an athlete can have a dramatic bearing on an individual’s sense of place in the world, but also how the world responds to certain issues that are played out in politics. Consider how the Olympic Games have provided a mechanism for promoting gender equality in recent years, or how individual Olympic athletes have become important symbolic motifs for specific ideas. The Australian indigenous athlete Cathy Freeman became a symbol of indigenous peoples’ rights when she lit the Olympic cauldron—the most privileged non-competition role at an Olympiad—at the 2000 Sydney Games. Her act, and the organizers’ choice of her to perform that role, must be explained in the context of years of protest about the lack of respect shown toward the indigenous people of the land on which the Olympic Park—Homebush Bay—was constructed.2 Alternatively, Muhammad Ali’s lighting of the Atlanta 1996 Olympic cauldron had particular historical significance in that it was situated in a part of America where he had experienced racism in the 1960s, even after having previously won an Olympic medal. Though it is often said that such moments are simply tokenistic and do not really address the way in which deep social change occurs, the world would not know as much as it does about racism without these historical sporting incidents, which gave special symbolic currency to social campaigns and which may have been particularly important in enabling populations to unify around an idea about the need for social change. Each instance reflects ways in which the unreality of sports, or the theater of performance, transcends its supposedly artificial environment. The argument that sports are simply game playing, or that they are separate from the real world in which more serious events take place, becomes untenable in such moments, when it quickly becomes apparent that these symbolic acts are among the most important parts of our real-world histories.
Though there can be no doubt that elite sports are often very serious play spaces, their ideology nevertheless relies on the playfulness of sport, in a similar way to how one might discuss other kinds of play encountered through the practices of music, dance, or acting. Thus, the athlete inhabits a social role that symbolizes various primary social virtues—excellence, dedication, struggle, and so on—that imbue their achievements with meaning. However, outside of the specific sports environment these values may hold little functional meaning themselves, and the practice of elite sport may be seen to compromise other social goods. In this respect, one may claim that the primary contribution made by athletes is to enrich our sense of values, which is why so much is at stake when an athlete is found to be cheating. Through their endeavors, athletes enrich a certain notion of what it is to be human and to pursue excellence.
As was suggested earlier, a cornerstone of debates about the state of the real in digital worlds has been the attention to virtual reality, the history of which requires further unpacking before one applies it to sport or to present-day digital culture. Hemphill (1995) notes that virtual reality isn’t a novelty in present-day society. More familiar (or, perhaps, less obvious) examples of its presence are “documents, phonographs, radios and television” (ibid., p. 56), which each allow a certain kind of escape into alternate worlds. However, virtual realities now are approaching a change in kind rather than degree; at least, the degree of change in virtual-reality technology is becoming increasingly profound. For example, consider how holographic technology has begun to transform our sense of being in the world—our perspectives on the necessity of travel or the nature of being somewhere at all. In 2015, Microsoft launched a product called HoloLens, which it describes as the “first fully untethered, holographic computer, enabling high-definition holograms to integrate with your world.” Recent developments in 3D screen experiences are altering people’s expectations of what filmmaking entails and what may be possible to express through that art form. Virtual reality is interesting in the present analysis for a number of reasons, though first I wish to consider its symbolic importance.
Ideas about what it may be like to experience a virtual reality—or simply to engage with the idea that it can be distinguished from another reality—have been present in literary forms for centuries. One might even talk of literature as a mode of virtual reality in which the function of narrative is to draw us into other worlds. Explicit engagement with the idea that we might be living in a simulation, or what that might be like, are common themes in stories, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, that compel us to think about the possibility of inhabiting alternative worlds. Popular fiction has also frequently devised ways of imagining virtual realities. The 1999 film The Matrix presents a world that is indistinguishable from the world we inhabit, inviting us to consider whether or not we would be able to know it if we were living in a simulation (Bostrom 2003). The 2009 film Avatar depicts a world in which it is possible for a disembodied mind to inhabit another being and, in so doing, extends the consideration of virtual realities to what it might be like to live cognitively and remotely inside another being. Perhaps the ultimate simulation film of recent times is Her (2014), which asks us to consider what it would be like to have a relationship with an artificially intelligent computer operating system that has intellectual and emotional intelligence superior to those of humans. These possibilities of experiencing life in “the singularity” are fascinating because they raise questions about our individual uniqueness, but also because they permit freedom to experience life beyond the single one that we enjoy.
Popular fictions such as those cited above are rooted in ideas that have been played out in other literary and scientific spheres. Thus, one may treat the pursuit of virtual worlds as an attempt to recreate the physical world as convincingly as possible, with various modeling techniques—from the development of figurative drawing to computer aided design—inextricable from the means available to us to imagine and subsequently inhabit such spaces. In the more radical propositions, the prospects of creating virtual worlds are often intimately connected to stories about the rise of machines as intellectual competitors with humans. In this way, debates about life in a digitally mediated virtual world lead invariably to imagining a state in which humanity may, one day, succeed in creating replicant beings—autonomous robots that could replace humanity, as in the 1982 film Blade Runner.
In this context, the possibility of virtual worlds is a mesmerizing subject to consider, as it is cloaked in a series of dystopian possibilities that invite response because they may soon be realized if we do not intervene. It is important to acknowledge this when seeking to separate the mythology of virtual worlds from the realities of present-day technology, or even near-future technological applications, since there are considerable differences. This is not simply a reality check; it is a recognition that a wider range of technological changes may result in biotechnological transformations. Thus, various altered human states also compel us to imagine what life would be like if lived in a different cognitive and corporeal dimension, whether through drug-induced highs or through extreme embodied experiences such as simulation of zero gravity or any number of “extreme sports” encounters. Indeed, Blascovich and Bailenson (2011) describe drug use as a route through which one may seek out life in a virtual reality. These more familiar human experiences are intimately connected to how one can begin to make sense of what life in a virtual reality would be like and what utility it might have.
Virtual realities envelop our worlds in various ways. Even an automobile could be described as a form of virtual-reality environment in which our experience of faster-than-human velocity occurs in a simulated space, protected by an absorbing shell that shields us from the wind and keeps us dry and warm. Such virtual realities are already strong indicators of what it might be like to live in a virtual world. The fact that we do not think of travel in planes, trains, and automobiles as forms of virtual realities has more to do with the way in which technological systems become seamless modes of existence than with the inappropriateness of our claiming them as modes of virtual existence.
Indeed, the design principles of technological development now aim to promote experiences that minimize the perception of a transition from offline to online reality. The most effective designs are those that make technology absent from the encounter, or what Peterson (2007, p. 79) describes as “mundane cyborg practice.” Good examples of this include the “rape in cyberspace” documented by MacKinnon (1997): In a text-based gaming world called LambdaMOO, one member of the community (the violator) took control of another person’s persona and proceeded to violate the character in the presence of all other users. It is easy to trivialize this example, by arguing that it was just a group of people playing a game, and suggest that what happened to the character didn’t really happen to the person. However, this kind of environment blurs fantasy and reality. People are there with different motivations, some playing out fantasies and others meeting with friends and having “real” conversations. The action mattered to people within its community and this is the basis for which it became a matter of moral concern. Thus, to argue that cyberspace is a manufactured, artificial, and unreal environment raises a question about whether anything at all that takes place in cyberspace is real, but the more obvious conclusion is to state that it all matters.
MacKinnon (1997) argued that, although it can be questioned whether the LambdaMOO incident did constitute rape, there was no doubt that “the current iteration of rape as constructed in LambdaMOO poses serious, real consequences for users of virtual reality.” Indeed, the incident was widely publicized and was said to be the event that turned a “database into a society” (J. Dibbell, 1993, cited in MacKinnon 1997) and was widely cited as a case in which a virtual world suddenly achieved a state of mundaneness such that what took place within it was seen as every bit as serious as if it had happened offline. This is not to suggest that rape in any form is mundane; it is, rather, to suggest that the subjection of this virtual world to wider social conventions and expectations is what allows it to make the transition into meaningful, real, and banal space, rather than it being a place of simple fantasy. In this respect, becoming mundane may be considered an aspirational value of all technologies, as it denotes the status of ubiquitous acceptance as part of the offline world. These aspirations are built into the design interface of new technologies, though it is often hard to achieve. A good example of this design aspiration is found in the case of Google Glass. Despite its withdrawal from production in January 2015, only two years after its limited beta release, Google Glass was always promoted as a device that would take “technology out of the way,” removing the need for an obstructive interface and creating an experience that was more seamlessly connected to our sensory intuitions. Yet it was among the most intrusive personal digital devices ever to have existed.
This perspective on the distinction between real and virtual is made more conspicuous in Annette Markham’s 1998 book Life Online, in which the distinction is reviewed in the context of cyberspace research. As Markham notes, “most authors presuppose a particular understanding of the term real … and often contrast real—when talking about computer technologies—to the term virtual” (p. 117). Yet this distinction is often not fully problematized; in fact digital-reality interactions can be as real as sensory-realities, since they are not fictitious realities. As Hayles (1999) writes, “merely communicating by email or participating in a text-based MUD (multi-user dungeon) already problematizes thinking of the body as a self-evident physicality” (p. 17). Additionally, as Turkle writes (1995, p. 180), “now, in postmodern times, multiple identities are no longer so much at the margins of things. Many more people experience identity as a set of roles that can be mixed and matched.”
There should be no mistaking the degree to which mundane technologies are, historically, remarkable and radically transformative. After all, what would it have meant for a person living in the 1830s to have seen something like today’s iPhone, 3D film, or holographic projections? Such innovations would have undoubtedly appeared to be magic, as Stivers (2001) might put it. Yet it would be flippant to imagine that such technologies would have changed societies dramatically then. Indeed, one of the most infuriating aspects of trying to retrofit technology into the past is the failure to consider the impact of any technology outside of the range of socio-technical systems that permit it to function and, thus, be meaningful. A laptop computer magically sent back in time to the 1830s without a software or energy infrastructure to enable its use would be of little use or interest. Considering technology outside of its specific social context rarely makes sense. This reminds us that considering the socio-technical dimensions of technology—that is, thinking of technology as systems rather than artifacts—is critical to understanding how we should regard it (Bijker 1995). In this sense, as Pargman (2000) notes, “computer games are never ‘just games,’” but are part of wider social configurations.
Central to the idea of virtual reality are the notions of immersion and interactivity. Different virtual systems entail varying degrees of one or both of these elements, but they are each always present to some degree. Immersion generally refers to the ease with which one inhabits a virtual world and the degree to which it compels us to feel as though we are in a genuine other world. Depending on the nature and sophistication of the technology, the experience may feel more or less believable, natural, and seamless in relation to so-called real-time movements, sounds, and shapes. Immersion can be facilitated with the use of three-dimensional optic displays, binaural sound systems, and movement-tracking devices. Additional feedback can come from optic-fiber data gloves or body suits that replace bodily sensations with computer-generated ones so that virtual body contact points have sensory correlates in the user. Interactivity refers to the degree of control the user has to affect what happens within the virtual world and its capacity to affect the user. How one negotiates these environments may depend on simple keyboard, mouse, or joystick maneuvering or may include kinesthetic/haptic feedback—that is, control of action through special gloves or hydraulically controlled motion platforms.
Despite more than thirty years of development, digital virtual realities have yet to satisfy the science-fiction writers who first imagined them. Most have failed to generate completely immersive experience, although since the launch of Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Microsoft Hololens, Playstation VR, and Google Cardboard there has been renewed interest in these possibilities. Yet to expect VR to deliver near-world experiences any time soon is to miss the point of their promise. In fact, they are never likely to exist in the way that was imagined. The “digital delirium” of the 1990s was never a delirium brought about either by science fiction or by cyberlibertarians such as Howard Rheingold. Instead, thinking about digital worlds as emancipatory spaces is best understood as a metaphor for thinking about socioeconomic change and the pursuit of global justice, which is a latent discourse within debates about the future and technological innovation. In this respect, the Internet’s main purpose is to reconstitute our beliefs about the role of the media in our societies, the consequences of which we are only beginning to see today as a result of the rise of blogging and the emerging crisis in various aspects of the media industry, such as newspaper distribution. The myth of the Zapatistas’ use of digital technology is a further indication of this, as is the myth of the Wikileaks network. Each of those virtual realities was a much more modestly populated digital revolution than was thought at the height of their impact, but each has significantly shaped our understanding of how much can be achieved digitally with relatively limited means. Virtual-reality systems are like this, and we see examples of this in first attempts to create new kinds of serious VR experiences, such as The Guardian’s first VR journalism application, which locates the user within a prison cell using Google Cardboard, to convey what it means to put someone in solitary confinement.
Amid the claims about the value of different degrees of reality, it cannot be presumed that there is a clear instance of reality that trumps all others. Indeed, MacKinnon’s (1997) definition of the real brings into question whether human existence has ever been real, since by that definition it was always mediated and interpreted. As MacKinnon states, “the primary difference then between the real and the virtually real is the interposition of some mediating and transforming agent or interface between the senses and the shared perception” (p. 4). Although MacKinnon places the condition of reality upon that which is interpreted through human senses, which is comparable to my term sensory-reality, this definition fails to accept its normative limitations. Thus, not all humans have the same senses or the same levels of sensory sensitivity—people have different degrees of smell, sight, hearing, and touch. There is no singular reality that all people share or which can be tested against some other virtual reality. Therefore, distinguishing between the real and the non-real is nonsensical if one does so by appealing to some other, fixed, true reality. It would be more accurate to argue that human existence, having always been mediated through human senses or some other media, has always been virtual, and that cyberspace is another medium through which humans experience reality—that is, an evolution of our sense of reality.
In the context of sport, it is necessary to distinguish between the participant and the observer in response to this claim. It might also be necessary to distinguish between a spectator who travels to the event to witness it live and a remotely connected spectator who experiences the event through a broadcast or some other technological medium. According to this characterization of VR spectators’ and participants’ experiences may be regarded as virtual in equal measure. One might more easily accept that a digital reality is more enjoyable than viewing a television broadcast, but not preferable to actually being there. For any virtual text (book, television, radio, and so on), the virtualness of the experience is assimilated by the viewer or listener—or what we might describe as the spectator. The spectator is brought to the real context through the mediation of relevant and meaningful symbolic gestures that bear resemblance to the physical world which we expect to exist. This is why Roberts (1992) is doubtful that representations of sport can ever do justice to the embodied experience of sport participation. However, simulation technologies may hold greater prospects to achieve a more truthful depiction of embodied action. Consider the recently launched platform Virtually Live, which uses 3D mapping and GPS tracking to translate a sports event in real time into a computer-generated moving image. The viewer can watch the sports event take place through virtual-reality goggles and see the actual movement of cars, but their view is of a computer-graphic rendering rather than of the live camera feed. In this case, with a lag of only 6 seconds between the event and the virtual experience, the simulation may be able to add additional layers of information into what’s happening (additional, that is, to what we see when relying simply on our senses).
Conversely, one can speak about virtual experiences for a participant. If one is within a virtual reality and the simulation is effective, then its virtual status becomes irrelevant; it is simply another form of reality. Conceivably, there might be some residual awareness that leads the participant to realize that the experience is a simulation. For example, if one is playing a virtual-reality combat game, then even if being under attack by some opposing military enemy would not create the kind of psychological trauma that a real attempt on one’s life would create, because the player is aware that he or she is in a game. However, deliberating on this point becomes uninteresting, as it becomes a matter of empirical fact as to whether the technology is able to deliver such richness of experience. Theoretically, if the simulation is good, such residual awareness should not be present and would be more like a form of psychological delusion where we are unable to tell the difference. Indeed, one would expect that in a true simulation—as was depicted in The Matrix—one would not be able to recognize the difference between the simulation and something that is external to it. Whether such simulations could be replicated through computer technology is, however, a matter also for technology to demonstrate. Yet we need not turn to technology to instill such feelings; we have them already in varying degrees of dream states. This alone seems sufficient to conclude that it is not impossible to create imaginary worlds that can seem real enough and which have real effects on one’s personality. Consequently, from both perspectives it seems likely that creating convincing digital environments that are indistinguishable from other sensory-realities is possible.
Two very different ideas about virtual reality were advanced in the preceding two paragraphs. The former (strong VR) recognizes that virtual reality describes the entire lived experience of humanity as a virtual experience and argues that there is nothing revolutionary (and thus alarming) about new digital realities. The latter argues that, even if one does not accept the virtuality of “real” life, it is also possible to claim that digitally mediated virtual realities can be sufficiently real (weak VR), and that these too can be desirable experiences to pursue. What seems unequivocal is that there is a second wave of convergence taking place within the digital sports world.
To understand more about this shift, it is useful to revisit the ideas surrounding the first wave of convergence, which are best explained through Brian Stoddart’s ideas about the “information superhighway” in sport. Stoddart (1997) imagined how various information structures and services, including home computing, television, radio, telephone, and email, would merge. That process would follow from the growing desire for more media consumption and the improved efficiencies that would be found in delivering personalized digital systems across networks. Twenty years later, many elements of that process have come to fruition, and sport has led many of them. Today’s transmedia experience entails the capacity to share content from one platform to another, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in physically stationary places or on the move. It involves the blurring of realities from game spaces such as sports to the game spaces of computers. Stoddart’s convergence never really focused on how the human experience would change as a result of this technical transformation—how the user would be affected. Yet we must consider the value of new technologies from a human-centered perspective if we are to derive an understanding of their importance.
To help us understand the effect of recent digital change, we need new metaphors to capture the Web 2.0 era and its impending consequences for human interaction. We no longer surf the Web, browse the Internet, or download data. Everything is streamed in real time, located in the cloud, embedded across platforms, and persistently in transit from one space to the next. If the Web 2.0 architecture of embedded content were to collapse today, most of the content on the Web would disappear, but this diminishes as we move increasingly into an app-based Web environment.
The idea of second-wave convergence advances a sociotechnical interpretation of media change that recognizes the need for societies to go through a cultural convergence, as much as a technological convergence, in order to realize the benefits of digital change. Sport is a strong indicator of how such processes are taking place. For instance, one may speak of a convergence in the experiences of athlete and spectators, as I will elaborate in part II. A key influencer of this trajectory is the desire of media organizations and sport producers to bring spectators closer to the athlete’s experience, to allow them a greater understanding of what it takes to make a great sporting performance possible. To assist in this pursuit, sports arenas are beginning to experiment with technology. For example, the billion-dollar design of a stadium for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons includes in-seat vibration technology—called “impact seating”—activated by collisions between players on the field. This technology echoes developments in other entertainment pursuits, such as the creation of the D-Box cinema experience, which allows the viewer to sit within a simulator that will move in response to what is taking place on the screen. The future of spectator experiences may thus be seen as a dynamic whole-body simulation, not just a seated experience.
This chapter has considered the idea that there is a reality against which virtual reality can be judged. It claims that there is nothing inherently valuable about either version of reality and, by implication, that nothing about a growing, digitally enabled virtual reality should concern us greatly. Sport in virtual reality might be devoid of the human body or even human contact as it is conventionally understood, though our present understandings of contact and communication are not adequate. Offline worlds do not have value that is superior to the other possible ways of being engaged in sport. Moreover, they do not lack the characteristics of sport that give it value. The human being is not absent in virtual sport. People still come together in virtual sport. Real communication still takes place in virtual sport. Any claim that virtual sport is reducing human existence to a functional, rationalistic way of living also misunderstands its possibilities.
In virtual sports, teams may not travel to a common physical location and compete on a physical track or field. The digital interface of Sport 2.0 may not be as inclusive as the physical worlds in which people gather. However, any loss in richness may diminish as people adjust to their new circumstance and as new technological possibilities are realized. Furthermore, when placed against the financial costs of bringing people together in physical space across the world—not to mention the environmental cost of getting there and the real difficulties of making the activity truly inclusive (not everyone can actually travel)—there are good reasons to aspire toward digitally delivered sports events. Historically, sports events have been imagined as experiences that must take place in physical locations. Some years ago, social events were also conceived in this way, but with more and more virtual chat locations, this mode of existence is now only one possible means of interacting with others. In short, a lack of interest in making sports virtual reflects more a nostalgia for a particular way of seeing our bodies than anything that is inherently essential to what sports should be. Such nostalgia serves to keep sports in a particular format, which is wedded to our sense of history, but it is a view that fails to take into account how we are evolving more broadly as a species. Our bodies are quickly becoming conduits of data and experiences, but the precise mode of that interaction need not be fixed.
Early debates about the Internet focused on whether it would herald the possibility of living a life of simulation, which no longer required us to enter the physical world again. Questions focused on whether people could map their understanding of the physical world onto cyberspace, replicating the same sense of what, for example, it means to be part of a community or our identity. Even today, these same questions persist about how to make sense of virtual realities, as either unreal-world environments or an integral part of our world. These questions are not asked solely of sport or forms of digital culture. Rather, one might make similar claims about other cultural or leisure-based activities, such as theater, literature, or music. Indeed, memory and dreams may also be forms of unreality that have a close resemblance to the kind of unreality present in either of the two practices under discussion. However, I have endeavored to show how each occupies a space that resonates with Michael Heim’s (1993) “metaphysics of virtual reality” to understand more about how different forms of reality have been treated historically and, as a result, how one should regard them in the future. After all, it is not yet apparent that the nature of digital virtual worlds is significantly different from, say, the virtual world of the simulated sports arena or any other form of unreal space. Indeed, Manuel Castells (1996) notes that the term virtual reality is misleading since “there has always been a separation of reality and symbolic representation because we always interpret everything we encounter through some system of meaning.” Similarly, N. Katherine Hayles argues that
For information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium. Whether that medium is the page from the Bell Laboratories Journal on which Shannon’s equations are printed, the computer generated topological maps used by the Human Genome Project, or the cathode ray tube on which virtual worlds are imaged. (1999, p. 13)
Both Castells’ and Hayles’ assumptions about unrealness also lead to challenging the further claim that our experiences of the virtual world is less important or valuable than the face-to-face or embodied reality of everyday life and that this has something to do with their unrealness. In short, there is presumed to be some reality “out there” to make the mediation possible. On this view, the mediated reality is our objective and tangible context against which all other virtualities are juxtaposed. This conclusion challenges the idea that this “reality” is also virtual and would, instead, accept that there is a true reality. Such a preoccupation with virtual reality’s inferiority is a foundational concern of this book, which asks what kind of importance sport has outside of its internal competition structure. Similarly, one might consider whether blogging has the capacity to transform society. In each case, the goal of the inquiry is not merely to unravel the philosophical meaning of concepts, but to understand how ideas are brought into existence through policies that place value in some things rather than others. In the case of blogging, the question does not simply ask whether words written in cyberspace can be influential outside of it. Rather, it inquires into the manner in which cyberspatial artifacts find their way into broader socio-political discourses. This is the crucial and limiting factor in determining their significance.
Despite twenty years of research arguing on behalf of the importance of the Internet as a political medium, it is still unclear how one should situate something like Twitter feeds within the media nexus, in part because it is difficult to judge which forms of mediation will last. Back in 2008, just over a year after the newsweekly Time announced “You” as its Person of the Year on the basis of the volume of user-generated content online, debate ensued about the influence of YouTube in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The following year in 2009, Twitter became the focus of debate about the world’s perception of the Iran elections. One reason why it is difficult to resolve these matters is that the debate about the value of social media often focuses on the platform, rather than on the professional practice that surrounds it. Similar questions are often asked about sport. In 2009, the International Olympic Committee was awarded Observer status at the United Nations, and for some years it has been preoccupied with promoting sport as a mechanism of peace promotion, but does it really bring about such changes in global political actions?
Each of these contexts—digital and sport—requires careful assessment to better understand how each constitutes our sense of reality and the social conditions that define it. From the monetization of Second Life to the widespread development of gambling communities for virtual sports fans, life online shapes and is shaped by life offline in many ways, establishing nuances in our use of the term reality. How these practices inhabit our lives and the various roles they play in constituting our worlds are crucial to our deciding whether or not to ignore the emergence of new practice communities in digital space.
The more sobering perspectives on the future of virtual reality that I have advanced ought not dampen our enthusiasm for its pursuit. Within sports, there is nostalgia for a pre-technological era, which is characterized by a mistrust of such innovations as virtual realities. Yet the more creative imaginations that depict virtual realities as worlds where humans interact telepathically or where smart textiles allow a person to feel as though he or she is moving in a computer-simulated world, influence how we imagine future worlds. However, these ideas should focus our attention on the world changing potential of technology and the importance of technology becoming mundane, before it can become radical.